Friday, January 17, 2014

Fair Representation at the Oscars

In what is perhaps the most well-known use of multi-seat ranked
choice voting in the United States, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences announced its Oscar nominations Thursday morning. Although just about
everyone is aware of the Oscar nominations, fewer people know that ranked choice
voting is used to pick them, or what effect that has on the movies that get
selected.

Ranked choice voting is a fair
representation voting system, which means that a much wider variety of
movies get nominated than if the voting were done by a winner-take-all method. For
instance, if every academy voter just voted for their ten favorite movies and
the ten movies with the most votes got nominated for Best Picture, it would be
possible for the tenth favorite movie of 51% of the voters to make it in and
the favorite movie of 49% of voters to get left out. The ranked choice voting
system guarantees that as long as a movie is the top choice of about 10% of
voters, it will be nominated.

It’s worth noting that the Best Picture nominations process
actually uses a modified version of ranked choice voting, which we previously
explained here.
Basically, the modification gives extra importance to voters’ first choice
rankings by eliminating all movies that don’t receive at least 1% of first
choices and only transferring votes to voters’ second choices when a movie
exceeds the threshold of election by at least 10%. There is also a variable
number of nomination “seats,” as anywhere between 5 and 10 movies could be nominated
depending on how many end up with more than 5% of the total vote after the two
rounds of transfers. All categories other than Best Picture use a more
traditional ranked choice voting system.

The Academy’s actual ballots are not publically released,
but that doesn’t mean we can’t make some educated guesses about how the voting
broke down.

The Best Picture award increasingly looks as if it will be a
three movie race between Gravity, American Hustle, and 12 Years a Slave. All three were locks
to be nominated, and likely received enough first choice rankings for a
fraction of those ballots to be transferred to their voters’ second choices.

That left the following movies in contention, according to
the experts at award-prediction site Gold
Derby, which gave them odds above 0% to win Best Picture:

·Captain
Phillips

·Nebraska

·The Wolf
of Wall Street

·Her

·Dallas
Buyers Club

·Saving Mr.
Banks

·Philomena

·Blue
Jasmine

·August:
Osage County

·Fruitvale
Station

·The Butler

Captain Phillips was
popular enough that it likely would have gotten in regardless of the voting
system used, so we can leave that out of the analysis.

It’s not as easy to identify blocs of Oscars voters as it is
to identify blocs of political voters. Oscar voters are not easily placed on a
left-right spectrum. But there are some ways in which voters group themselves
that likely translate into Oscar nominations. I’ll discuss some of them below,
in terms of this year’s contenders:

Director Loyalty

Certain notable directors have, over the course of their
illustrious careers, cultivated groups of followers that will be more likely to
vote for their movies – in effect, partisans for a specific director. The 2013
movie that most benefited from this was The
Wolf of Wall Street, which was divisive among critics but earned a nomination
on the strength of director Martin Scorsese’s name. To a lesser extent, Her’s Best Picture nomination can be
credited in part to the loyal following of director Spike Jonze.

A brand-name director is not always enough to secure a
nomination, however. Blue Jasmine,
Woody Allen’s latest production, failed to secure a Best Picture nomination,
perhaps due to being released too early in the year to generate much Oscar
buzz.

Guilds

Some Hollywood guilds have a considerable degree of overlap
with the Academy. When a guild is in support of a certain movie, it could
single-handedly push that movie over the threshold of election. The Screen
Actors Guild, for instance, has shown support for Dallas Buyers Club actors Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in its
own awards. The SAG winners will not be announced until this Saturday, but McConaughey
and Leto were nominated for Best Actor and Supporting Actor, respectively, and Dallas Buyers Club was one of five Best
Picture nominees. It is plausible that the SAG’s support pushed Dallas Buyers Club, which seemed to be
on the bubble for a nomination, over the edge.

Movie Genre

Some voters of the Academy seem to have preferences for specific
types of movies. In particular, the nominations from the last few years suggest
that there is a contingent of voters supporting smaller independent “art-house”
films and foreign films. Under ranked choice voting, the art-house bloc won
nominations for Winter’s Bone in
2010, The Tree of Life in 2011, Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012, and
Nebraska this year.

The foreign film-loving voting bloc has had less consistent
success, and likely makes up a percentage of the Academy somewhat below the
threshold of election. They voted in The
Artist in 2011 (which would go on to win Best Picture) and Amour in 2012, but failed to get a
nomination for another French movie, the 2013 Cannes Palm d’Or winner Blue
is the Warmest Color, for this year’s Oscars.

Nations

There is really only one national voting bloc of large
enough to matter in Oscar nominations: the British. Though they only
make up about 4.5% of the Academy with 250 members, that alone is almost
all the votes necessary to get a movie past minimum 5% threshold for nomination.

Those voters helped push The
King’s Speech to Best Picture glory in 2010, and this year they managed secure
a nomination for the British film Philomena.

After Britain, the nationality with the next most Academy
members is Canada, with just 57 according to the L.A. Times – not enough to have
a significant effect on the nominations election.

--

There are three movies among the contenders that were
generally likeable and might commonly be considered “Oscar-bait,” but were
never able to inspire much passion: Saving
Mr. Banks, August: Osage County,
and The Butler. These movies might
have been ranked in the bottom half of a significant number of voters’ ballots,
but because of the proportional ranked choice voting system that was not enough
for any of them to secure a nomination.

This is by design. The Academy would rather have a slate of
Best Picture nominees such that everyone cares passionately about at least one
of them, rather than two or three front-runners and then a handful of movies
that no one thinks are the best.

Now, let’s revisit the list of contenders and categorize them
by their “party” in the Academy. This is obviously an inexact science, as the groupings are largely speculative and there
is presumably a great deal of overlap among these parties, but it gives some
idea of how multi-member ranked choice voting works in practice for the Oscars.

The “legislature” of Best Picture Nominees now resembles
what one would expect a body elected under a fair representation voting system
without a strong party structure to look like. As a result of the use of ranked
choice voting, a broad array of preferences and constituencies will be
represented when the nominees are read at the closing of the Academy Awards.

A similar diversity can also be seen in other categories
such as Best Director, where Nebraska
director Alexander Payne (Art-House Party) and Martin Scorsese (Scorsese Party)
beat out Captain Phillips Director
Paul Greengrass for the final two nomination spots. Captain Phillips was popular enough to exceed the 5% minimum of
votes to qualify for a Best Picture nomination, but did not produce enough first choice
support to exceed the more challenging 16.7% threshold to win nominations for
Greengrass or Tom Hanks for Best Actor.

This year’s Oscar nominations are an excellent case study
for how fair representation voting systems, and ranked choice voting in
particular, elect more representative candidates than winner-take-all systems and
empower all voters to help elect a candidate of their choice.

When the Oscar
winners are finally announced on March 2, we will further examine how ranked
choice voting for single-winner elections elects the candidate with the
greatest degree of both strong and broad support.

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About OscarVotes123

This blog is dedicated to examining and explaining the innovative voting systems used by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to nominate and select winners of the prestigious Academy Awards. For more than half a century, AMPAS has used the choice voting method of proportional voting to nominate candidates in all award categories. Since 2009, the Academy has used instant runoff voting to determine the winner of the coveted Best Picture award. Read on to find out more about these systems and what they mean for Oscar voting!